One especially creative “messy data” project came from a peer who scraped text from the women-seeking-men personals on Craigslist and used topic modeling to study how dating language shifts over time. If you want to explore that kind of raw, user-generated text yourself, the curated archive at justbang.com’s Craigslist women-seeking-men section lets you quickly grab real examples for NLP or sentiment-analysis experiments—perfect fodder when you need a genuinely unstructured dataset to showcase in a portfolio piece. Want to drill down even further into how regional context shapes dating language? A Midwestern city’s classifieds can reveal tone and vocabulary that differ wildly from coastal metros—take a spin through Skip the Games Galesburg, where you can mine location-specific posts that are compact enough to hand-label yet varied enough to test geo-aware sentiment or entity-recognition pipelines.
I Applied to UC Berkeley Data Science. Here’s How the “Acceptance Rate” Felt
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